The Hand's Hand
by Speaker of Words
Summary: Mara Jade captures Kam Solusar to train him to kill Darth Vader. AU Timeline: Halfway between RotS and A New Hope
1. Prologue

A/N: I do not own anything in the Star Wars Universe, except my own story lines.

Prologue

They were coming. They had found him, even though he had taken care to leave no indication that he was not Kaidan Salvador, the alias he was using. Yet they had still found him in the lower levels of Coruscant. He hadn't even settled into his new hiding spot, and already he was cornered. He had not had time to make a backdoor yet, and there was only one way in and out of his house-that-wasn't-quite-a-house this deep in Coruscant.

He was not being attacked by stormtroopers for a change, it was only one person. With a lightsaber. He hated that. Palpatine had destroyed the Jedi including his father, and was replacing the Jedi Order with Sith. This one was different, however. He had already fought her once before, at the Fondor Shipyards, and her aim was to capture, not kill. She had been difficult to fight. Only by indulging in his anger at his father's death had allowed him to elude her. He didn't have the skill to defeat her.

Now she was cutting through his door with her violet lightsaber. He had only seconds, and he was trapped in his bedroom, with nowhere to run. He activated his lightsaber, as his only option left was to fight.

The door fell in, and Kam Solusar jumped out at her, attacking when she was still off guard. She hastily blocked his strike, and began fighting defensively and retreating, out of his living room into the street. Kam saw blue arcs coming at him from the side, and he realized he had lost in the brief moment before blackness took him.

* * *

Mara Jade, Emperor's Hand, quickly disarmed the two stormtroopers and killed them with their own weapons. _No one must know. Vader would not be suspicious about their deaths, he would assume they ran afoul of a gang. She would be able to train an apprentice who could go head to head with Vader and eliminate him secretly._

A/N: Review please! Even flames with constructive criticism will be welcomed!


	2. Turning

A/N I own nothing, ever. I forewarn you now, there is torture in this chapter. This is my first and likely my last time writing torture. I only put it in through necessity.

"Whom do you serve? Answer me." Mara demanded, slamming down a fist on the table between them.

Kam looked up at her and she saw fury in his eyes. "I serve no one," he replied.

"No," she hissed, "you serve my will."

"I will never serve you," he spat.

She leaned back and pressed a button on the wall behind her. Kam screamed and shook violently, as electricity ran through him, burning him.

"Perhaps you should rethink your answers." she whispered, her finger lightly tracing the button. Abruptly she reached out and slapped him.

"Whom...do...you...serve?" she asked again, punctuating every word with a blow.

"I... will...not...serve...you..."

Jade's whisper was chilling: "Oh you will, you will. After all, we have all the time in the galaxy." She reached for the button again. This time she kept her finger pressed on it for a few moments. Kam's screams filled the interrogation room, lasting even after she took her hand off.

"You...can...do...whatever... you... want...to...me...but... I...still...will...not... serve...you," he said with great effort.

She took out a spiked club from a closet near the door, and began to demonstrate its use. Kam hissed in pain as she lashed him once, twice, three times.

"You serve me. You serve no one else."

She hit a button on the club, which started vibrating. Jade walked around so she was standing next to him, facing the same way. She lashed out with the club and hit him in the chest. Jade left it there, embedded. It began electrocuting him at varying intensities. It was set like this so he could recover, then be broken when it shot back up.

"Let's see how well you do with that for a week or two."

* * *

_Pain. _

That was all Kam could think. _Pain. _Blinding, shooting, agonizing _pain!_ There was nothing else. The club pulsed in rhythm with his heart. Kam didn't know how long this went on. It seemed ages, but could have been seconds. He didn't know if his heart beat every minute or every age. But every beat sent that pain throughout his body, jerking his every muscle in synchronization with his heartbeat.

Thump thump.

_Pain pain._

Thump thump.

_Pain pain._

Slowly, inexorably, the pain started leaving. It receded slowly, as if it didn't want to leave. Then…

Agony! It was back! Tormenting, harrowing, excruciating, unbearable _pain_!

_Pain._

* * *

_Three weeks later_

Mara was pleased. Kam had been brought to his breaking point. It had been more difficult than she had thought to break him. She had expected it to be hard to break even a partially trained Jedi, but apparently his father had trained him longer than originally thought. But at last he was broken. Now she just needed to rebuild him.

"Whom do you serve?" she asked yet again.

"I...serve...your... will," his response was still weak, but he was gaining strength back. If he responded well, he didn't get tortured.

"Why do you serve?" she asked.

"Because it is your will," came the subdued response.

"How will you serve?"

"You will train me in the dark side of the Force. I will carry out missions aimed against Darth Vader, and help you in yours when needed."

"And when you face Vader?"

"I will do anything to destroy him, including giving my own life."

"What if you fail?"

"I will either try again, or if I cannot, I will kill myself and deprive him of the pleasure of doing it himself."

"Your training begins tomorrow morning. Be ready."

* * *

Oddly, Kam never remembered his training. He was going out on his first assignment today, and he couldn't remember any of the training he had just finished.

Kam frowned. That was something he was supposed to be able to remem—

_The mission. Concentrate only on the mission._

The voice came from inside his head, but he had no idea where it was coming from.

There were Rebel snipers on Kashyyk that had protected the Wookies during their last slave run. They had obliterated a battalion of stormtroopers and devastated two others. They had to be taught a lesson.

A hiss told him that the landing ramp had opened. He walked off the shuttle and viewed a large number of Wookies in front of him. Armed Wookies. With Stormtrooper rifles. There were at least a hundred Wookies there, maybe a hundred and twenty. The shuttle lifted up from behind him and flew quickly away, looking, if possible, for a ship, scared of the Wookies. Those were its orders. Drop him off and fly away. He would contact it to retrieve him upon success of the mission.

A large Wookie with a silver squared belt growled at him. Kam thought it sounded like a challenge. He activated his lightsaber and charged.

_If I can get them to surround me, I'll only have at the most ten or fifteen Wookies engaging me. They aren't used to blaster tactics. They won't know enough to back up._

The Wookies only hesitated for a second. They all began shooting at the same moment, filling the air with the sound and stink of blaster fire.

Kam deflected the shots, not bothering to take time to direct them back at the group, but charging right in. He reached the group, and decapitated four Wookies with one stroke. On the backswing he chopped off a Wookie's arm that was making a beeline for his face.

A sudden barrage of blaster fire from all sides as well as from above told him it was high time to retreat. He Force-jumped above the Wookies, deflecting fire as he soared into the air. He cleared the Wookies that had gotten behind him, and landed facing the army that had come to meet him. He backed up quickly, blocking blaster shots that seemed to be coming from to many directions. He looked up and saw the snipers in the trees. All of them were natives, blending in with the massive trees, and all were wielding sniper rifles.

He jumped onto a branch, and jumped up to the nearest sniper to his position, who used his arms to pull himself from branch to branch away from him. Kam caught up to him, and sliced his wrists off.

_It got what it deserved. It shouldn't try to defeat something that has more power than it does._

He progressed to the next sniper and the next, ignoring the fire from below.

_At this range, those rifles are more likely to hit me by accident._ As if to prove his point, a blast came up and hit a meter to his left.

The Wookies started to hit closer and closer.

_Those blasts are nothing to worry about. _

They were now beginning to hits the massive branch he was on.

He redirected a series of sniper blasts back at the surprised Wookie, who fell off the branch, leaving an arm, a leg, and his sniper rifle on the branch.

Suddenly, he was falling. The branch he had been standing on was falling with him. He noticed that there were blaster marks almost all the way through the cut end.

_Apparently they can do damage down there._

He used the Force to guide his descent and direct both his feet into a sniper who, apparently, thought his death was guaranteed. The brute fell off the branch, and Kam landed exactly where the sniper was, losing his balance slightly. His lightsaber was still activated, and cut through part of the branch. In the scar, he saw the remains of a well-disguised communications device.

_This was planned. Only the Rebels would give them this sort of technology. They may have given them other surprises as well._

He leapfrogged to where he saw the highest concentration of snipers. On his way, he passed a sniper rifle that had fallen onto a branch. It was the same the Rebels were using.

_If they had other surprises, they either can't get them here or are extremely arrogant. I've already knocked out half the snipers, with another quarter in close range._

He saw a Wookie with a white stripe of fur around his shoulders and chest wave a gray flag at him. He wanted to talk. All the other snipers and the ground army stopped firing. Kam leaped to him.

White Stripe spoke through a translator droid. "We want to know what you are doing here."

_Remember, you are always to act as if on orders from the Empire, even though you receive your orders from me._

Again a voice from nowhere rose, unbidden.

"I am hunting Rebel snipers, who have denied the Empire their rightful property."

"The Empire cannot enslave a race at the Emperor's whim!" The translator droid even sounded angry.

"Tell your people this. They are to destroy their arms, and give up the Rebels within the hour, or they face extermination."

White Stripe quickly kneeled down, pressed a button in the hidden communication device, and turned to jump down to a lower branch. In one smooth movement, Kam cut off his legs so the Wookie knew he was dead, then beheaded him.

The other Wookies started firing at him, and to his dismay, the snipers had reorganized so they were still spread out.

_It will only take about ten more minutes of this, until the snipers are all dead._

The battle continued, with Kam taking out the Wookies by either finding and killing them, or redirecting their shots. In minutes the snipers were decimated.

He jumped down to the Wookie landing pad, were the army waited. In moments they would see just what the dark side could do. And they would run.

He grinned.

* * *


End file.
